Sages ancient reblogging quarters

Sorry for the earape, the funny had to happen...

Anybody can use this as long as they credit me and ideally let me know about what gets made from this lmao, extras under cut!!

I never guessed that in my adulthood, I’d be relating to Calvin’s parents as much as I do in this comic.

“I once knew a girl… Amber…”

THE WEEVA weaver looks so silly idk

mad monarch (2)

A mouth-watering fuck-ton of hand angle references.

It's time for The Moment You've Been Waiting For! The moment where I utilize everything I've discussed to outline the narrative purpose for Susie being mixed! Right here, right now!

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How am I gonna stick this goddamn landing?

I've been doing setup for six thousand words and I barely understand how to put the payoff into writing. You thought I had a plan? You thought I was some storytelling guru that would effortlessly wrap this analysis up in a bow? Hell no, I'm just as confused as you! I've been flying by the seat of my pants from the jump. You're the assholes that bought it hook, line, and sinker. So if I mess it all up, it's your fault, really.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Okayokay, calm the fuck down. you have the ideas, you just need to synthesize them. You have the conceptual cores of the game, and you have the narrative cores of Susie's arc. All you have to do Is put. it. all. together. You can do this.

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Listen. If you went into these posts anticipating some major revelation about Susie that 'proves' she's half human, you're sorely mistaken. We both played the same game and have the same information to work with. If there was some smoking gun, I wouldn't be writing this and you wouldn't be reading it. As I've said, temper your expectations.

My job here is to justify the theory's existence. From where I stand, there are two requirements needing fulfillment to do that:

It has to provide context for her core urges in a unique manner; By unique, I mean in a way that other forms of context (like Susie growing up in a human community rather than being half human) cannot account for.

It has to be consistent with the ideas Deltarune is trying to get players to contemplate (you can call them "themes"). To repeat, if a theory isn't aligned with the intended themes, then it serves no purpose and doesn't need to exist.

And remember: This needs to be done within the confines of what we know about the narrative. I can't speculate about anything yet because no amount of speculation for a story beat is useful if the story beat does not work. That's why I spent so long on the other posts. I set the floor plan, now I'm pitching the table.

Asking "Why"

I explored a lot about how Susie responds to her surroundings based on her psychological triggers. What I didn't cover was why those triggers occur.

Take a look at this nifty flow chart I just made up.

So far we've talked about a lot here; Susie's urges, the challenges to them, and even the ways she could overcome or regress into them. What we haven't talked about is the first part of the graph; The bad experiences she went through to get her into these mindsets in the first place.

Because that's where Susie being mixed (and the struggles that come with it) would go. Issue is, we don't have any stated information about her past that implies as much. And of course we don't; like I said, no smoking gun.

Take Susie being banned from playing a piano and then smashing it. That provides context for her urge to subjugate what she finds unjust and her urge to externalize her image of worthlessness, but saying it implies she's mixed is too speculative for me. Same with the rest of her stated context; Nothing she's said about her past can't be attributed to some other explanation, like her simply being raised in a human community. So it's over, right?

The good news: we can use our understanding of storytelling to get a better grasp of Susie's backstory without speculating too much. In real life, if someone told you that, oh, I don't know, they hate blue ribbons, you probably wouldn't think too much about it, because there's probably not too much to think about. They're just a guy with an arbitrary set of beliefs whose life isn't dictated by a three-act structure.

But when Susie Deltarune says the same thing, You implicitly understand that this is setup. A good story doesn't introduce a beat without intending to resolve it.

We may not understand exactly why Susie hates the blue ribbon, but by taking as a given that the narrative intends to make sense, we can deduce that Susie, at some point, had a negative experience with a blue ribbon, and that experience will be explored. Instead of the context defining the urge, the urge defines the context. We can extrapolate this logic to her other fixations.

So in order to assert that Susie being half-human works, we have to look at concrete behavior of hers that can't be explained by other reasoning (as of now). Is there anything like this?

Long story short: Yes, I think so.

In chapter 2, we learn that Susie has a tail and that she hides it too. This is yet another example of her gut urge (and her head urge) in action. She's scared of having her vulnerability violated, so she denies and distracts from the (frankly obvious) in order to maintain a semblance of control over the situation.

What I want to know is why. Not just why she feels the need to hide it, but to do the same around monsters. Monsters have tails! If Susie only exerted this urge because she felt the need to present as human in the past, then her doing the same in a monster community doesn't make sense. So that's off the table.

Well, okay, there's still a chance that the behavior is caused by her urges rather than explaining them. If Susie wants to present as tough and in control, It doesn't help that she's got a cute little itty-bitty ass tail. So she hides it.

It's still an urge born out of body insecurity, but it doesn't need to be "dissected" to function as a proper narrative device. Its origins can be completely arbitrary and it still works as a symbol for her arc. In fact, you could argue that this plays more into her low self-esteem; she's not 'cute,' shes scary and bad. (And I would agree!)

I think this explanation would've held up, or even had been preferable if we were still in the chapter 4 era. She only explicitly acts like this with her tail, so you could make an argument that it's just her tail she's insecure about and leave it there. Good thing there aren't any other body parts she does the same with-

Fuck you Toby. Stop giving me hope.

Susie's response to Kris pointing her lips out is exactly the same as Noelle pointing her tail. one for one, bar for bar, it is an identical urge trigger. she gets embarrassed and tries to hide it. Even down to her lines; She doesn't respond with some dumb quip about how she wouldn't make a kissy face, no, it's "don't point those out."

And these are her lips! Like, with her tail, there are other reasonable explanations for her behavior. With both, not so much.

My point isn't to speculate that she looks "different," it's to show that these are not the words of someone secure in their body image. Chapter 5 takes this idea from being speculative to being textual. There's a pattern here; It's not something her urge causes, it's something that causes her urge.

All of this to say that Susie's body insecurity is, as of chapter 5, something that NEEDS to be explained by the narrative. and, as of right now, Susie being mixed provides context for that uniquely, as opposed to her simply being raised with humans.

Again, NOT DEFINITIVE PROOF. NOT A SMOKING GUN. I'm not saying that any of this will come to pass. All I'm doing is putting the context of Susie half human under the least charitable light and showing that even then, it still has a reason to be theorized about. That was my job here, and I hope I did it well!

What it Actually "Means"

Whenever I talk about Susie being half human in other discussions I've had, what inevitably follows is the question: “what does this add to the narrative?” If you've ever had a Deltarune theory, you've been asked this. Hell, I asked it about chess theory at the start of this thread!

Responding to this question sucks for a couple of reasons. Usually it's because the person asking it isn't genuinely interested in how it connects to the ideas of the game; they just think it doesn't, and that you haven't thought about it enough to reach that conclusion.

And on top of being asked a question from someone uninterested in hearing an answer, you probably don't have a google doc ready to deploy at the slightest hint of skepticism. And if you do, nobody's gonna read that shit! I know from experience.

So what's the best way to answer this? Easy- assume your theory is true and see what changes.

"Isn't this speculation?" NO! It's interpretation! Narrative consequences for a theory are not themselves evidence that the theory is true- but they explain why the theory is valuable as an interpretation, and that's what we're interested in.

So, assume Susie is mixed; Do I think this interpretation is valuable? Yes, I do, because it ties back seamlessly into the themes and urges I already set up! That's why I did two whole posts about that bullshit!

We've already talked about how coping mechanism for her body issues. Not only would this re-contextualize that fixation, but it would outline potential for a symbolic depiction of overcoming her urges. If positive growth for Susie is allowing herself to be vulnerable, thus facing her fear of rejection and betrayal head on, then the way to do that is to have her physically stop hiding herself. To show the parts of her body incongruent with her self-image so that she can ACTUALLY be herself.

And this provides a perfect segway into the thematic core of Deltarune! Under this theory, Susie is liminal in a multifaceted manner; Her body itself would be liminal in the context of her physical characteristics being influenced by her different parents. She's liminal in a meta-contextual sense, as both the fandom and in-game characters have trouble defining what she actually is, an idea that Toby himself plays into.. A reveal of her being mixed would be liminal in nature- a period of confusion and discomfort followed by her character resolution.

We've deduced that liminality is a precursor to self-actualization; Susie's arc ending of accepting her body for what it is and being courageous enough to show it to the world is just a narrative representation of that!

This is what freedom is for her: Loving herself- every part of herself. Going against every instinct that's been hardwired into her since childhood in a beautiful moment of self-acceptance.

Will this happen? That's not the point. What is the point? I just told you. I needed to justify Susie being mixed in the narrative, and I just did that. My job's done on that front.

Now What?

Okay, so after eight thousand words, what we have is a hopefully justified baseline for theorizing. There's more here that can justify the theory, but this is a skeleton outline that works well enough. The table has been pitched; now we can build it.

I can finally start actually writing about ideas I have without getting those "what's the point" questions that suck, cause now I can just point them to this!

What, you thought I wouldn't be doing actual theories? Buddy, you're in for a lot. Stay tuned.